On 03/01/2012 08:03 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
Am 29.02.2012 22:52, schrieb Kai Meyer:
Is it possible to extend qemu to support a new image type? I have an
image type that is ready for consumption and I'm looking for the
integration point between qemu and the new image format.
Which image format do you want to get integrated?
Have a look at block/qcow2.c to get an idea of what a qemu block driver
looks like. At the bottom of the file there is a struct that contains
function pointers to all exported functions, so this is usually a good
place to start exploring a driver.
Kevin
Great, this is exactly what we're after. I work for StorageCraft, and we
would like to figure out some way to allow qemu to directly consume our
image-based backups. It would provide us with user-space mounting (via
libguestfs) as well as booting VMs directly from Backup images. We
already have a proprietary image access library that provides block-wise
access to our image files. I have been able to scratch together a proof
of concept already, which I am really pleased with.
I see only two roadblocks for which I don't have immediate answers for.
1) Licensing
Is it possible to license our contributions in such a way that we do not
need to open the source code of our image access library?
2) External dependency on our image access library.
We do not want to force qemu to require our image access library to be
present to build. Would it be better to do a conditional build
(./configure --with-spf) or a run-time check for our image access library?
